The brief length of the release—just over 16 minutes—works greatly in its favor. As inviting as New Blue Sun could be, it was also, at nearly an hour and a half, an unwieldy sprawl. A first listen to sketches almost dares you to dismiss these piano takes as throwaway fragments that stop short before achieving any kind of liftoff, but repeated spins reveal a wealth of intriguing detail.
As a finished release, this isn’t quite as tossed off as its maker would have us believe. The strongest piece, “off rhythm laughter,” transcends its one-take-improv origin thanks to savvy post-production touches including looped background laughter and a faint drone that gradually overwhelms the keys, leading into a minute of blissful ambient drift. Like watching a coherent image dissolve into blots of pure color, the effect is straightforward but highly effective. (In contrast, the addition of a drum machine on the final piece, “i spend all day waiting for the night,” almost feels like a letdown—a guardrail on a sandbox.)
Even on the more stripped-down pieces, the playing rarely feels haphazard; surprisingly, André often sounds more assured at the keys than on the acoustic and digital woodwinds heard on New Blue Sun. On “and then one day you’ll…,” he alternates between warm, swelling chords and droll single-note turnarounds, outlining a skeletal song form, while on “hotel lobby pianos,” he finds a charming six-beat vamp that vaguely recalls what McCoy Tyner—one of the piano inspirations he cited in his Instagram announcement—played on John Coltrane’s version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” a piece memorably covered on The Love Below. What he lacks in technique, he makes up for in a patient, inherently musical approach—he may just be noodling, but the sketches can’t help but resemble blueprints.
It may be tempting to draw comparisons—or contrasts—between André’s playing here and the various names he listed on Instagram, including another jazz great, Thelonious Monk, and master songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim. But, as with the many well-circulated touchstones for New Blue Sun, it’s probably best to take the artist as his word: As an instrumentalist, he’s not remotely in their class, and, with his candidly novice approach, he’s not making any effort to get there. (Nor is he playing “jazz” simply because he’s working spontaneously: The Köln Concert, this is not.)
As with New Blue Sun, some may ask of 7 piano sketches, what gives him the right? The right to treat his doodles as gallery-ready—or worthy of being rolled out to the world via the stunt-like piano-as-backpack costume portrayed on the cover, which André sported at the Met Gala the night the release dropped, with accompanying prestige merch. The simplest answer: because he’s André 3000. Few contemporary artists in any genre have united off-the-wall originality and massive success in quite the way he has. So, yes, he is a special case. Naturally, we’re going to read more into a curated collection of his home recordings than those of the fellow parent at school pickup who offers to send us a link to their Google Drive.
So, just like New Blue Sun, these pieces could never be considered in a vacuum, nor should they be. They have to be heard as part of a larger experiment, an inquiry into what happens when you reject the careerism at the heart of the pop machine and decide to go a quieter, less goal-oriented way.
And even the chronology here matters: It’s not simply that the flute excursions of New Blue Sun emboldened André to try the same experiment with the piano. It’s that, in the wake of that foray, he was inspired to dig out recordings that previously, as he stated on Instagram, he’d only ever relished privately, or texted to family and friends, indicating that his faith in a directionless direction is steadily growing.
Sure, you can listen to these pieces and wonder why they aren’t more “finished”; why he didn’t take piano lessons and then try again; why he’s bothering with any of this at all instead of getting back to the virtuosic rapping that made him famous. Or, you could just be grateful he saw fit to add us all to his Contacts list.
